“We used to come here every Saturday morning, me and your mother,” she said. “When we were girls we thought cinnamon toast was the best thing in the world. We thought it was very continental.”
I tried to see our mother and aunt in this worn, still luxurious cafe. I imagined them as two giggling girls, already big for their ages, swooning over their Saturday elevenses. I thought she must have been romanticizing: putting the girls they had been into a more genteel era. They seemed a million miles from Mandy, Linda and I, trolling up and down the Golden Mile and nipping in for chips with Timon.
“You’re very like your mam at that age,” Aunty Anne told me, and I nodded and smiled, knowing very well that I was nothing like her.
I was in my best going-out frock for that afternoon. It was Mandy’s. I’d wriggled into it, knowing this was an occasion of sorts and, true enough, Aunty Anne had just finished pouring the tea with an elaborate flourish of the dainty, impractical strainer when she started to tell me All About Herself.
With the glorious indiscretion I was to get used to, she launched directly into the tale of how she and her husband, my Uncle Pat, had stopped loving each other.
I was agog.
Aunty Anne:
That’s how simple it was. I stopped loving him.
One day I was making him breakfast,
his and our son’s,
and all of a sudden, that was it.
Bang and Pow, like Batman, or the Annunciation.
I didn’t have to stay.
The truth was as clear as the toaster before me.
The toaster you had to whizz bread through
twice, because it never got hot enough.
I stopped loving him and it had gone overnight, like germs
sometimes do.
Our son was grown up by then, and there was no reason to stay for his sake. I spread the toast with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and I laid out jars of marmalade, plum jam, lime jam, blackcurrant. The sun came through them bright and stickily and I started to dare myself:
Leave, leave, leave,
You don’t love him anymore,
You could go this afternoon,
After the gasman’s been this morning and had a look at your meter.
My heart set up a mad tattoo.
I could go.
Colin, our son, was ill, of course, and nothing would change that.
Did I tell you he was ill, Wendy? We don’t
really talk about it.
It was my biggest staying-or-leaving factor, but
he would never get better.
What I did would make no odds.
Colin came into the kitchen, looking so skinny,
so helpful. No longer a child
so did he need me?
Ask him outright:
If I walked out this afternoon,
What would you think of me?
I day-dreamed him
saying back, Mother,
get yourself away,
If you don’t love him...
Well, then.
I had a tingling up and down these legs of mine.
There was a dance going on somewhere,
somewhere I didn’t know about yet.
Someone was picking out a tune
for me, and I
had a dancing partner
I had yet to find.
I just knew Colin would understand his mother.
I’ve brought him up a clever,
sensitive boy, a credit
to me.
So this is me. I left my family and Scotland
behind. I moved to the north of England
where I snared myself
a lover—yes!—me!
Well, look at these legs!
They’re bound to hook new admirers.
Here’s a picture of me with my new lover.
Not much to look at, perhaps.
Not to a young girl like you.
I go back, every six months, to see my son,
They live in the centre of old Edinburgh.
I’m like Mary Queen of whatsit
Going back.
I left and first I told my husband I’d fallen
out of love,
He took it on the chin.
“You were a young girl when I took you on,
and I was already knocking on.”
He looked me up and down
still handsome, proud, my hair
at that stage,
a fabulous tangerine.
“I should have seen this coming one day.
Some young fella whisking you off.”
I laughed. “Nobody’s whisking me off!”
But off I went.
I followed the A1 through the Borders,
across wild Northumberland
endless Roman Roads, perilous with sharp
crests and sudden
dips
I settled in Newton Aycliffe
A place called Phoenix Court
And word came that the old man I’d left behind
had become a millionaire.
The Saturday after I left
his six balls,
and
his bonus ball
popped out
in perfect sequence.
And bugger me if I hadn’t
burnt all my boats.
Wendy’s friendships.
I said I wouldn’t do this...nip ahead of the bookmark, as it were...I wouldn’t show off my foreknowledge, but...it has struck me that there are things in common through all the stages of my life. Namely, these extraordinary women I have known. I’ve surrounded myself with these personalities the whole time. Early-learning with my two big sisters, I suppose...so I’ve always needed these big women around me. I pass from friendship to friendship...not that I exactly leave friends behind...but new friendships have a habit of becoming more pertinent, of seeming that way...and there are tHose friends you must let go of for a while. Doing their own, peculiar things. I have found that you can’t keep hold of everyone at once.
If friendships are worth anything, you’ll find some way to keep it all carrying on, under the surface, or away to the side. Then one day... but there will always be lulls. It’s worth being aware of that. At first I found it upsetting, that one day someone is your best mate...you’ll share anything with them...like now, with Aunty Anne divulging the truth of her cankered love and her lost millionaire...at that moment it seemed a promise that we’d always be this intimate. Intimacy always ends up making you think it’s forever. But you have to get wise. Intimacy is a great flatterer. It’s very easy to put on...you simply draw closer, lower those lids, that voice...There would be times to come when Aunty Anne simply wouldn’t dream of telling me what was going on. When she would clam up tight and I could only roughly surmise and rely upon my other friends. Yet it’s bollocks depending on just one person, that’s worth knowing. Anything can happen to them. Limit your damage potential.
So...I’ve spread my affections wide. Concentrated bursts here, here, here, in a largish semi-integrated group. Loosely-held formation. Like sympathetic bombs, setting each other
